Hello everyone, well we are coming into what I would call the "brown season" from a landscape photography point of view. The colors are gone, the leaves have fallen, and what do we do with the photographs that lack color and interest as is?

Turn them into black and white!

So, here is my process.

Original File

Bracketed Shots fro HDR

To start the process, I took the 5 bracketed shots and ran them through Nik's HDR Efex Pro 2 to even out the tones and colors.

Resulting HDR Shot

I then ran the resulting HDR shot through Nik's Silver Efex Pro to get a Black & White rendition.

Black and White Result

This resulted in an interesting shot, but still lacked some finishing touches.

So, I then went through a hand dodge and burn effort in Photoshop to give the photo a little more punch.

This was accomplished with a handful of curves layers, and the infamous "grey layer" for dodging and burning.